After 25 years as a single woman, being alone felt more natural for author Joyce Maynard than being on a date — until it didn't.

The proposal was sweetly corny — intended as a surprise, but obvious from the moment I saw Jim's expression as he handed me my glass of wine. He'd brought home oysters that evening and arranged them on a platter he carried onto the deck with a bowl of mignonette sauce as we settled in to watch the sun set over San Francisco Bay.

Not the kind of scene I spent the first 40 years of my life inhabiting, coming as I did from a small town in New Hampshire where money was tight and mignonette unheard of. And where, on the occasions when I poured a glass of wine (not chardonnay, just "white" or "red"), I generally drank it alone.

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"You might want to be careful with that one," he said, indicating a particular oyster that seemed to rise a little higher off the shell than its neighbors. "Maybe there's a pearl in it."

There was a ring, of course. A two-carat diamond.

I'd never owned a piece of jewelry like this. The only other time I'd worn a wedding ring, it had been one I'd purchased for myself at a pawn shop in New York City for $10 shortly before my 1977 wedding. I had never seen myself owning a diamond.

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But more than that, I had not imagined myself as ever again wearing a wedding ring. Now here was this man I loved — not even close to wealthy, just a believer in diamonds, evidently — taking my hand across the oysters and asking, "Will you?"

It was not any surprise that Jim's intentions ran to monogamy — or that, once coupled, he tended to stay that way. I had known this from our first evening together, and it had made me uneasy. He was so obviously serious, a man whose excellent sense of humor did not extend to matters of the heart. At age 59, he had one 16-year marriage behind him, followed by a 19-year relationship and a couple of short affairs. This was a man who, once he gave his heart to a woman, was unlikely to change course with any ease.

Whereas my own record — one 12-year marriage that had ended a quarter-century before, followed by too many mostly brief relationships to count, only a few of which made it to the one-year mark — suggested strongly that I might suffer from a problem with commitment. Over and over, I chose partners so inappropriate, the end was guaranteed from the beginning. When things got difficult, I felt the urge to flee and acted on it.

But now I was 20 months into a relationship with a different kind of man, having rented out my house and moved into his. Six months from my 60th birthday, I was holding a diamond ring in my palm. There was no doubt in my mind that I loved the man who'd offered it to me. My doubts lay in the concept of marrying. Anyone. It had not always been this way.

I'd married young — at 23. Had children young (three of them). Though trouble came early, my children's father and I had struggled on for years past the point when we might have gone our separate ways if children hadn't been part of the picture. More than anything — including my happiness — I'd wanted our children to grow up in a home with both their parents. Three times I had given birth at home in the dead of winter — once with no midwife present. But the prospect of divorce had terrified me.

In the fall of 1989, when our marriage finally ended, I told myself that I wanted to one day find my true life partner. Though the word "marriage" scared me, I imagined more children, or blending my family with someone else's. I wanted more than a love affair, I said; I wanted to make a home with a man again, to have a domestic life as well as a romantic one. But in 25 years, I had never actually lived in any house whose mortgage didn't bear my name, or with anyone besides my children. Not even with them, once the last one left home. When the chips were down, I counted on my women friends — or my own solitary resourcefulness.

Then I met Jim, veteran of his own failed marriage, with three grown children. It was a match.com date — for a drink — that lasted five hours. Four weeks later, we moved in together.

And now, the oyster. The ring.

The ease with which this happened, after the struggles that had preceded it, amazed me. Always before, even when I was with a man I loved, I'd feel relief when he went home — alone having become, for me, the more natural state of being. Alone wasn't perfect, but it never hurt the way trouble with a partner could. I never got on my own nerves. I didn't get my hopes up, when alone, that something might be possible that ultimately wasn't, and when things went wrong, there was nobody to blame but myself. Alone, I knew what to expect, which was more of me. No one would break my heart so long as I never entrusted it to anyone.

Now here was this diamond. Unfamiliar as the concept was of wearing such a stone, when Jim held out the ring, I put it on. I called up my children and told them we were getting married. While the sight of that diamond on my finger took me aback, to no one's amazement more than my own, the idea of commitment to Jim felt neither awkward nor strange.

It was this man who made all the difference. Partly, too, it was changes within myself — being older among them. Over the years, large losses, big failures, and disappointments had taught me how little the small things mattered. I'd known real trouble, and it wasn't socks on the floor or an affection for online Scrabble on the part of a good man who adored me and made me laugh and never bored me and never said or did a single thing, intentionally, to hurt me.

I loved him for that, but equally important, I liked who I became with him: more tolerant, more patient. His kindness and generosity inspired mine. I marveled at how I seemed to have finally learned how to be in a relationship, without tears or drama or pouting or petty complaints of the sort I'd indulged in plenty over the years.

I won't say it was easy, after more than two decades as a single person, to identify myself as one who was truly attached and unavailable, as I did at last with Jim. In the absence of a full-time partner, I'd always allowed myself the small pleasure, and sometimes thrill, that came from maintaining an appearance of being an unclaimed woman.

With no ring on my finger, this was simple. I sought attention, and I flirted. I accepted the kindnesses of men who — though never my true partner, or anybody else's — did me small favors (checking out a used car for me, lending their truck, buying me a drink). Very likely, these men were meeting some need of their own, for something less than a relationship but more than nothing, as I was meeting mine.

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It was comforting, and it protected me from the risk of big pain. Bet your life on a person and lose, you're in trouble. Bet Friday night, and there is always Saturday.

But putting the ring on required another, more substantial adaptation. One of the things a person can hold on to — when she remains unattached as long as I did — is the dream of the perfect partner. In the absence of a flesh-and-blood husband there in the bed, you can hold on to the fantasy that the person may one day appear who can play the guitar and sing harmony, a man who knows Zydeco dance and owns a house on a lake in New Hampshire, but also an apartment in Paris as well as a Boston terrier and a convertible. He will be six feet tall with all his hair, with a family you adore and children who (possibly because they were orphaned so young they don't even remember their real mother) will love you. He is a Tantric master. Also a great cook. Also funny.

The moment the real candidate arrived, whom I recognized as possibly capable of filling the long-standing vacancy of Life Partner, was also the moment I had to confront the parts of the dream that would no longer come true. However good, however lovable, the flesh-and-blood man falls short of the fantasy. In certain crucial ways, however, he delivers what is needed, and sometimes more — i.e., delights that were never on the list. (And when this happens, you might just learn the difference between what a person wants and what she actually needs.)He keeps your feet warm in the bed. He's there when you turn out the lights and again when the sun comes up, and he gives every indication that this will not change.

And one day it occurs to you that perhaps you fall short of meeting every aspect of his fantasy also, and that in spite of this, he loves you. You may not need the fantasy so much anymore. Once you're dealing with reality, not dreams, the picture of whom you're looking for may look a little different.

The six-foot height requirement had presented a problem. For me, tall meant strong, in control, powerful — and so when Jim stood up from the table to extend his hand the night of that first meeting and I registered that he was a man upon whom I might actually look down when I wore heels, I made a snap assessment: Not for me.

Some weeks later, though — despite my early misgivings — we were still together. It took me by surprise how happy I felt around Jim, though I was still avoiding any appearance of that dreaded and longed-for element: commitment. Accustomed as I was to trouble in a relationship, I remained on the alert for the inevitable red flag.

It was Fleet Week in San Francisco, which meant the Naval fighter pilot team, the Blue Angels, was in town. We were sitting on my outdoor deck on the outskirts of the city when a formation of those fighter jets roared overhead.

With my feet up, and my gaze to the horizon, I told my 5' 9" boyfriend how I had always loved the Blue Angels. Loved them, and found the image of those swooping and diving fighter planes strangely stirring. Sexy, in fact.

"You know, don't you," he told me, bending closer, looking into my eyes and speaking low, "there's one primary requirement for being a Blue Angel? To fit into one of those planes, the pilot can't be taller than 5' 8". Sadly, I'm too tall to command a fighter jet."

I drew in my breath.

Eighteen months later, there we were out on the deck again, with those oysters. The relationship had developed with an unprecedented absence of disagreement or struggle — a fact that might once have led me to suppose something was lacking. Love without heartbreak? What was that?

But I'd learned a few lessons late in the game. Drama was overrated. Constancy was growing on me, as was goodness.

Over the many years in which I lived as an unattached woman in a world of so many couples, I developed one behavior that might actually have assisted in bringing me closer to the point of lifting that diamond ring out of the oyster shell and slipping it on my finger. I started studying more closely the relationships of those people among my friends whom I would describe as happily married couples — the ones who still touched each other and laughed and — happy as they might be to see me — appeared equally happy to be alone with each other. I watched these friends as a visitor from another planet might. How did they do it? What made this strange and exotic behavior called marriage possible? I did not ask them their secrets, because one of the things I came to recognize was that when two people are married to each other, not simply staying married but truly committed to the marriage, they do not (as I had done with some frequency over the years) divulge all their secrets, even to a good friend. Their primary loyalty remains to each other. This was a concept as incomprehensible to me as string theory or the infield fly rule.

My well-married friends were loyal to something else, too, I observed, an entity that was neither husband nor wife: the marriage.

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"Husband" — an alien term to me. "Wife," though I'd been one long ago, even more exotic. But I practiced saying them in my head. Turned the words over. Got used to them.

A few weeks after I accepted his proposal, Jim brought me to see the jeweler from whom he'd purchased the diamond. The setting he'd selected for it was temporary, he said. He wanted me to choose the permanent one. Permanent. As in forever.

Sitting with Jim in the office of his friend Joel, the diamond dealer — son of a diamond dealer, grandson of a diamond dealer — I extended my hand, which had seen a manicure maybe four times in my life and not for a while, and explained that I wasn't really the diamond type. Though I didn't say anything at the time, I think I was wondering whether I was the marriage type.

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"I come from New Hampshire," I said, as if this explained it. "I don't normally wear jewelry like this."

"You haven't been married to Jim before," the diamond dealer said.

"It seems so expensive," I said of the setting the jeweler had suggested. I, the bargain hunter who'd filled her house with yard sale castoffs, I with my rough hands and untended nails. I, the unclaimed woman, accustomed to taking care of her own self.

"This ring is about Jim's feeling for you," he said. "This is what a man does when he wants to show a woman he loves how he feels about her."

"It's a beautiful ring," I said. "But I wouldn't love Jim any less if he had bought me a cheaper ring. Or more if it were more expensive."

"It's a symbol of marriage," Joel said. "A symbol of who you are to this man." He looked hard at me then. At me, not my hand.

"I don't actually need a diamond ring," I said again, although more softly this time.

And I didn't, of course. What I needed, which I hadn't actually admitted until now, was this man; what he needed was to buy me this ring, which — to him — symbolized the preciousness of who I was to him, the indestructible nature of his love. Where I'd wavered, he'd held steady, and because he had, I could experience something rarer even, perhaps, than love. This would be trust. His faith in our ability to make a marriage fortified my own. The diamond dealer was eyeing me as if through his jeweler's scope.

"Are you a member of our society?" he asked. There might have been a few different ways to take his question. But I don't think I was being asked whether I belonged to the society of people who can easily afford two-carat diamonds, oysters, mignonette, nice chardonnay. I think he was talking about the society of people who set aside notions of the perfect partner to make room for the real one — and count on him to do the same. The society of people who believe that making a lifelong commitment is real, and attainable.

Until this moment, I had never felt I belonged to that society. But more than that, my heart had never fully belonged to anybody but myself. I was on the cusp of 60 when I finally set aside my fears about all the things that could go wrong, all the imperfections and discomforts and possibilities for pain that loving someone creates — along with the joy.

It had been a long time coming, but I had found a man I trusted enough — and I finally trusted myself enough — to believe that although some of those hard things were likely to occur, it was a better thing to face them together.

I said yes.

Joyce Maynard's works include memoirs and novels, the latest of which is After Her. A film based on her 2009 novel Labor Day, starring Josh Brolin and Kate Winslet, opens this month.